Interestingly, this lecturer who talked about Psychological Gardening in the very first lecture, has infused a lot of Buddhism into his lectures. He repeatedly talks about the importance of self-awareness and having a sense of control.
He talked
about how seeing that certain conditions within our control, we gain
confidence in our abilities, in general. For example, if we see that we can
make time to train more, we will hence be more confident of achieving higher
performance.
He then
talked about how psychological conditions are within our control as well. It’s
interesting that he highlighted that athletes who perform well are able to
identify the slightest bit of self-doubt or negative emotion and snap out of it
to achieve their peak performance.
Of course,
these skills that people use to create such psychological conditions can be
trained. He calls it: dealing with our inner chimps. How apt a description it
is, isn’t it?
In today’s
lecture, he said something that made me feel proud as a Buddhist. I quote,
”There are
a lot of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy techniques that are greatly similar to
Buddhist practices. In fact, CBT can be seen as a contemporary, scientific way
to Buddhist practices. Some coaches have included meditational practices into
their sessions and found tremendous effects on increasing the mental toughness
(resilience, overcoming challenges, commitment) .”
(Cognitive-Behavioral
Psychology deals with people’s thinking processes and behaviors. Hence, a main
focus on therapies is the practice of self-awareness – of people’s thoughts—and
training people to change their thinking patterns to increase a desired effect.
Eg. Getting those with low self-esteem to catch themselves in self-doubt)
Through the
history of the development of psychology, a huge flaw, due to the human nature,
has occurred. Psychology used to focus on curing the negatives, correcting the
wrongs, etc. However, it has vastly neglected the positive nature of humans. It
has neglected the processes of naturing, facilitating and fulfilling people’s
potentials.
“When you look at a tree, see it for its leaves, its
branches, its trunk and the roots, then and only then will you see the tree. (Soho)”
Indeed,
this (adaptive) flaw that we have of noticing the negatives can be seen in our
daily practices where we often fail to praise the good but instead only
criticize the bad. Sometimes, this bias can have a snowball effect and cause us
to never be able to see the goodness in people.
So he made
us do something:
-whenever
we name a flaw/reason to doubt ourselves, we must pair it with something
positive about ourselves.
-whenever we name a flaw to someone, we must pair it with something positive about
them too.
So being
the extremely critical person that I am, I sat down for quite a long time to
think about it.
And when I
saw people as a whole individual (like a whole tree) instead of as a
composition of just their flaws, I found myself a happier person.
Why a
happier person? Now that I see them as an individual, a whole person, a lot of
the negative emotions that I used to feel about them has gone away.
Try it, you
might become a happier person too J
Change is the new constant. We experience change in every single moment, we all do but the magical reality is this - depending on how we view the change, it will give us a different world of experience. 
Special Thanks to the kids at Ti-Ratana Orphanage, for being my inspiration to share. May the merits accumulated through the effort and joy of this sharing brings you joyoues smiles and beuatiful success in your life
Carpe Diem! - Seize the day.
